What does 'next-gen' meant to you? From trawling through XBW's very own forums and countless others that I visit some of the most-oft requested features are high resolution graphics, destructible environments, super special effects and rock solid frame-rates. Full Auto from SEGA aims to give you all that and more all wrapped up in a frenetic, adrenaline packed racer where the aim of the game is to not only finish first, but blow the crap out of anyone, or anything that gets in your way.

To take a step back for a minute, the shoot-em-up racer type genre didn't have many games available for the Xbox and apart from a few exceptions; the most of what we did get were almost utter garbage. I'll probably get dragged through the coals again for liking 187 Ride or Die but for the price (sub $50), it had solid graphics, plenty of action and even some great multiplayer or co-operative action if you were lucky enough to find someone else that actually bought it. Full Auto shares a few things in common with it as there's a stack of blistering offline and online racing, but also a lengthy career mode, some of the most insanely destructible levels going around and working even more in its favour, no half arsed story that nobody cares about. Working against it however is its extremely repetitive nature, a couple of other issues that I'll go into and, unfortunately, it's yet another Xbox 360 game that while plenty of fun, at $100+ is probably a tad over priced.

To unlock everything in Full Auto you'll want to jump straight into the games career mode and as you progress there's a stack of cars and a few new weapon packages that will become available. Consisting of 16 tournaments, each with varying numbers of events, the career mode is quite lengthy and you can make your progression through it as challenging as you like. The races give you a bronze, silver or gold medal to earn, each with increasing difficulty. Getting through on bronze isn't overly hard, but there are plenty of new skins and colours for the cars to be earnt if you aim high and go for the gold. Actually that sounds better here than it actually is in the game as after blowing away handfuls of opponents, creating hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of destruction and coming first, a couple of new car colours isn't really much of a reward!

Anyway... the reward in Full Auto however is that win or lose, most of the fun to be had is trying to cause as much destruction as possible by showering your opponents with a rocket up the tailpipe, as much lead as possible from your bonnet mounted machine guns, or dropping a mine in their path at the right moment. The levels feature amazing amounts of destructibility and the traffic is also fair game and can be rammed or blown up as well. Your stray ammo or rockets can take out the front of buildings, scaffolding, parked petrol tankers and plenty of other parts of the scenery in satisfying showers of particle effects and shrapnel, but unfortunately also with the occasional frame-rate hit thrown in for good measure which is hopefully a sign of poor coding and not the limits of our beloved 360.

With all the breakneck racing going on, traffic exploding around you and buildings collapsing, as well as the other racers trying to take you down the chances are pretty high that you're going to end up exploding or miscuing a corner and to help counter this, in the offline modes, Full Auto features the ability to rewind time. The meter that controls it is easily filled simply by blasting as much of the environment as possible and if you're unfortunate enough to screw up or get obliterated you simply press the RB button in to rewind time back a notch or two and avoid that mine that took you out, or take that corner you misjudged just that bit slower. It's a pretty cool feature, sure it's nothing new but it feels right at home in Full Auto and when playing online or in the races that disable it, it is missed.

The graphics in Full Auto may not be up there as far as PGR3 is concerned in terms of realism but there's plenty of attention to detail and each of the levels look great. The city tracks are packed with plenty of unique buildings, statues, power poles, traffic and everything's nice and sharp with plenty of graphical effects such as depth of field and the damage that the cars suffer is also extremely detailed. As you're racing behind someone pouring copious amounts of bullets at them you'll see bullet strikes working their way into the paintwork, panels flying off, tail lights breaking and just as your opponent has taken as much damage as they can, you're treated to a slow motion 'death cam' zoom effect that tracks them as they fly to pieces. Yep I realise it's nothing new and to be honest it was done better in the Burnout series but it's still a satisfying reward after a well placed rocket sends one of your opponents into next week.

A few reviews that I've read have criticised the graphics a bit which I feel is undeserved. Ok they're a little bit rough at times, especially the slow motion zoom effect I just mentioned (it looks a bit erratic and feels kind of 'tacked on'), but if you take the time to look closely there's quite a lot going on. Switch to the bonnet camera view and you'll notice real time reflections from the environment, there's plenty of traffic and quite a few cars on screen at the same time and at the same time, usually bullets, rockets and missiles detonating everywhere during the crowded parts of the races. It's a shame that the frame rate takes a dive from time to time as one would expect the 360 to be able to handle games such as Full Auto at a rock solid 60fps.

The audio in Full Auto packs a nice punch with its explosions and your mobile armoury sounding as beefy as you would expect. The machine guns especially sound great and it's extremely satisfying as you let rip and start tearing the car in front of you to shreds. If anything I found the game quite loud compared to other games and had to actually turn the volume down a few notches to keep the peace. That's not a complaint as the audio does a good job and even the cars manage to sound a bit different. They don't handle different but hey, it's an arcade game through and through and realism obviously isn't what Sega was going for.

If you finish the career mode, get bored of it or just want to head online the Xbox Live modes and menus are all handled very well. It's straight forward to set up a lobby or create a private game to then invite your mates into and in the games I tested Full Auto out with there was almost no lag at all which is always welcome. Even games against other gamers from who knows where were lag free and quite a bit of fun but like many other Live games, the biggest problem can be finding people to play with. Quite often searches for quick matches returned no results, especially during the day time but later at night was more successful and always fun.